[thom]

1 is cool. I worked at a company where we discussed doing this with carriers for their corporate customers, where obviously you have all the historical data and tariffs. On the technical side every bit of activity was an event, so we could easily replay it through a theoretical tariff, and we wanted to use genetic algorithms to come up with new, better tariffs (which were pretty complicated as they involved various different international voice and data rates). You might think it was in carriers' interests not to do this as they make tons of profit on their customers overspending, but apparently not.

We never ended up doing this, however, and most of their tariff discussions continued being back-of-cigarette-packet calculations.

The idea and technology would actually be applicable to all sorts of domains - utility bills, for example.